PRECOLUMBIAN ARRIVALS: possible arrivals to the Americas before Columbus

1000 BC In They Came Before Columbus, Ivan van Sertima argues that ancient
Egyptians and Nubians reached Mexico.

1000 AD Vikings arrived in Canada. Vikings also raided the British Isles and
sold residents into slavery around this time.

1311 Emperor of Mali, Abubakari II, sets off to Brazil with 2000 boats according
several sources (see web articles).

1421 The Year the Chinese Discovered America by Gavin Menzies marshals
evidence for a fleet of Chinese junks that circumnavigated the world.

SPANISH CONQUEST: Spain sponsors a quest for wealth in the New World

1492 Columbus reached the Caribbean and thought he was in Asia (hence the term
Indians for original American inhabitants). Spanish explorers follow
his footsteps and conquer the island of Hispaniola (which is today Haiti
and the Dominican Republic) and from there conquer Puerto Rico (1508),
Jamaica (1509), Cuba (1511), and Florida (1513). Cortez
overtakes the Aztec in Mexico in 1521, and Pizarro begins to overtake
the Inca in Peru in 1531. The native populations (such as the Carib and
the Taino in the Caribbean) resisted the Spanish repeatedly. However, European
disease took a heavy toll along with the violence the Spanish used in
their pacification campaigns where the Spanish had the advantage
of horses and gunpowder. The Spaniards enslaved the Indian survivors and put
them to work in silver and gold mines. This also took a heavy toll. Bartolome
de Las Casas suggested that the Spanish just focus on converting the
Indians to Catholicism and look to the trade in African slaves, which at this
point was rather small in scale, to fill their labor needs. Unlike the English
or French, some of whom will come to the Americas to settle and start a new
life free of religious persecution and other forms of oppression at home, the
Spanish initially viewed the Americas as sources of wealth (especially silver
and gold)-- not necessarily as a place to settle and start a new life.

Many Africans, slave and free, accompanied and assisted the Spanish explorers
and conquistadors in the New World. Numerous Africans settled in Spain while
it was under Moorish rule from 711 to 1492. Islamic Spain was a tolerant, multicultural
society that peacefully incorporated Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Africans
began to develop sizable communities in several southern Spanish cities starting
around the 13th century. Some were slaves. However, Spanish slavery not based
on race. African slaves joined other members of various ethnic groups who had
been taken in just wars, or condemned, or had sold themselves into
slavery. There were free blacks in these cities as well who practiced crafts,
owned property, intermarried with the larger population, and who formed benevolent
societies for Afro-Spaniards.

1496 A West African man who took the Spanish name Juan Garrido joined
an expedition to Hispaniola and encountered other free blacks there when he
arrived. One of them, a translator named Juan Gonzales, would join Garrido on
future missions.

(It is likely that these Africans took part in the pacification campaigns against
resisting native populations and perhaps against maroons (escaped slaves) who
also resisted the Spanish.
By 1503 maroons were reported to allied with the native population against the
Spanish. Everywhere there were slaves in the New World, there were maroons.)

Once the Indian wars on Hispaniola were settled, the island became the base
of operations for Spanish conquest. Africans took part in the Spanish expeditions
that claimed Puerto Rico, Jamiaca, Cuba, and Florida. Juan Garrido and JuanGonzales,
for example, helped to capture Puerto Rico and became gold miners there. Later
they helped Ponce de Leon with Indian slave raids on the islands and in exploring
Florida. Later still they joined Cortez in attacking the Aztecs and their city
Tenochtitlan in Mexico. Ultimately these Afro-Spaniards settled there in Mexico.

1526 Five years after Ponce de Leon had tried to claim Florida, a Spaniard
named Ayllon left Hispaniola to attempt to settle Florida. (The French and the
English felt that you couldnt just claim an area without actually peopling
it and creating a settlement.) Ayllon brought 600 Spanish men, women, and children
along with the first known group of African slaves to the US (in what
is now southern Georgia.) The colony struggled with disease, starvation, and
Ayllons death. Some of the Spanish mutinied and took control of failing
colony, Thereafter someof the African slaves set fire to the compound of the
mutineers. At this time the Guale Indians also attacked the settlement. The
surviving Spaniards limped back to Hispaniola. The Africans stayed with the
Guale making them the first group of Africans to settle in North America.

1528 Narvaez makes another failed attempt to colonize Florida (near
Tampa Bay) with 600 Europeans and an unknown number of Africans. After a series
of disasters only four men survived. They walked from Galveston, Texas to Mexico
over the course of 8 years. These were the first Old World people
to see the American Southwest. One of them, the Spaniard Cabeza de Vaca, wrote
about the experience and recorded how Esteban, an Afro-Spaniard who was technically
a slave, was key to their survival as a translator and negotiator with the Native
American societies of the American Southwest.

1537 Hernando De Soto made another attempt to settle Florida with Europeans,
Africans (free & slave) and Indians from Cuba. People from all of these
groups left the settlement and ran off with the Florida Indians.

1565 Anxious to kick out the French Huguenots (Protestants shunned in
Catholic France) who had settled in Florida and South Carolina, the Spanish
finally managed to create a permanent outpost in St. Augustine (hailed
as the USs oldest town). Later this will also be the site of the first
free black town in North America.

Even though the Spanish (including Afro-Spaniards) had superior force (and
the deadly weapon of Old World diseases), the native populations put up a fierce
resistance and repeatedly challenged the invaders. Even as the native people
were overpowered militarily, many continued to resist (e.g. Hatuey in Cuba).

To read about more examples of Afro-Spaniards and other free blacks in the
settlement of Florida see Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida.

The fact that Africans in the New World might be enslaved or free, that they
might be allied with or against the Spanish or with or against the native population,
shows that, at this point in history, there was no hard and fast line the separated
black/white and slave/free. People of African descent were both conquered and
conquerors, they were both allies and enemies of Europeans. Sir Francis Drake,
for example, successfully allied his English crew with what he called valiant
maroons in South America to defeat the Spanish in Peru in 1572. (Centuries later,
escapted slaves (maroons) from South Carolina will ally themselves with the
Spanish to defeat the English.)

Still, the brutal transatlantic slave trade was beginning to develop, and around
1700 a new social and economic system--the Atlanic plantation system--would
change all this.